Posted
by
Zonk
on Tuesday December 11, 2007 @05:38PM
from the i-am-deeply-shocked dept.

The MTV Multiplayer site has the saddening news that the LittleBigPlanet demo, probably one of the most-anticipated PlayStation offerings for this year, has slipped to 2008. Not terribly surprising given the time of the year. "'I can officially confirm that there won't be a demo this year,' Ron Eagle, senior manager of PR for Sony Computer Entertainment America told me. But he did say he's played 30 of the games 50 planned developer-made levels and that it's a lot of fun. He seemed genuinely pleased about his time with the game, but his company won't be showing more 'LBP' at least until next month. Eagle could only add that the full game is set for a 2008 release. And with that, the video game release calendar for 2007 is complete. No more delays. No more surprises. Right?"

Any site that can give Metriod Prime 3 a 90%+ can't be trusted for reliable numbers. Especially when Ratchet and Clank ToD only gets an 88%. One of those games is far superior to the other, and it's *not* Metroid.

Well obviously your a fanboy. I am not saying R&C is bad, I think it's fantastic but Corruption outshines alot of games released in 07, including Assassins Creed, Halo 3 and the Orange Box.
Games that outshine Prime 3? COD4, BioShock, Mario Galaxy & Crysis.

Despite R&C being brilliant, I list Prime 3 as the 5th best game released this year.

The PS3 has too few exclusives at the moment, Motorstorm and Resistance both got old very quick and the above mentioned Rachet and Clank is currnetly

Ratchet & Clank is great, as they always seem to be, but I just don't find Tools of Destruction as good as the older ones. There are fewer things to collect and a lot less to discover by returning to previous levels. I also really miss the ship combat and customization that was present in earlier titles, though maybe I'm the only one. An 88% score seems totally reasonable to me. It's a great game, and the first game to get me to buy an HD console, but it was a little disappointing on depth compared

Uncharteds rating it 89.9% on Gamerankings which (last time I checked) was less than 90%, and although I'm not the greatest math student I thought Ratchet and Clank's 88.9% was less than 90%... So the only PS3 games ranked above 90% on gamerankings are Oblivion and Call of Duty 4 which are available for the XBox 360.

Hey 2006! It's great to meet you. I'm so happy you didn't notice the price [gizmodo.com] drops [wired.com] this year. Yes, they sold the console for $600 one year ago. But I think you'd have to be a moron or live in Europe to pay that much at this point. And based on the fact that you cite dollars and not euros/pounds/yen/canadian, I doubt the latter applies to you.

There's obviously a rather large demographic that doesn't care about "the hardware."

Yeah, that would be me. I don't care about the hardware.

Unfortunately game development companies and games publishers don't seem to agree with me. So games are going to come out which I will be unable to play without a 360 or a PS3 even though the gameplay would be perfectly possible on a Wii. That's why I'll likely end up buying one of the other two sooner or later.

Though disappointed there's far too much other good stuff I haven't even started on this year. My PS3 copy of the Darkness still has its wrapper on for some reason, Ninja Gaiden goes 3/4 unfinished though it is excellent and Mario Galaxy is taking up a lot of my time at the moment, and thats onlyt when Table Tennis isn't. Must get round to finishing Zelda, and I like the odd Motorstorm race online too. So much quality, so little time - and I've asked for the Orange box for xmas as well...

last time i checked, the Orange box is also available on the Xbox 360.

Too bad Team Fortress 2 is nearly unplayable on there. It's bad enough that it doesn't have Halo-esque aiming assistance, since that was a big part of what made Halo playable. But the real dealbreaker is the lack of matchmaking: you have to use the braindead "host a game" vs. "join a game" system, which means you're at the mercy of whoever starts the game for level choices, settings, and (most importantly) network speed.

Note to console developers: Halo 2/3 have their faults, but matchmaking is one thing th

I had a Windows PC. It kept breaking. Every time I'd go to run Counterstrike, I'd have to download yet another damn patch. Every once in a while, a game I bought would simply refuse to believe that my DVD drive was valid during the "check copy protection" phase. Lately, it became obvious that my video card wasn't up to all the new games. I decided after twenty years of PC gaming that I was damn sick and tired of all the pain of making everything work. Not to mention all the orphaned titles in my collection that no longer work well on my current machine, for various reasons. It was especially annoying because I use Linux for all my real computing. The Windows box was just for gaming, and I had to go through all the Windows annoyances just to play a damn game.

So about a year ago I bought a console. Now I just put the disk in and it works.

I wonder how many console players ever switch over to playing PC games? Beyond WoW, that is. Probably has to do with the whole "dwindling PC games market." There's diehards, but it seems plenty of people are perfectly happy getting the Orange Box on a console this year.

How do you even play shooters with a controller? It's not a few "diehards", it's anyone that's ever gotten good at a PC shooter. You simply can't switch from owning with a mouse to fiddling with little sticks.

No, you really can't. Only console diehards make this assertion. If you or someone you know claims to have done this, I question their true level of pwnage.The wiimote is closest to PC out of any of the consoles, when it comes to FPS control - and even it is, at most, only half as awesome as a kb/mouse combo.

But don't take my word for it, do some reading - PC vs Dreamcast: Quake 3. The one situation in my memory where console gamers went head to head with PC gamers in a non-handicapped FPS. Guess what h

I imagine on the Wii you can point at the screen to aim, use the nunchuk to move (optionally holding Z to strafe, perhaps), shoot with the trigger button and do other stuff with the control pad and A button.

Since I don't actually play shooters, I can't cite any shooters on the Wii, though.

Yeah. It actually works pretty well on the Wii: aim by pointing at the screen, look around by pointing near the edge of the screen, and walk with the analog stick. For an example, check out the Wii version of Scarface. It's mostly third-person view, but there are FPS moments, and the controls work as well in FPS mode as they do during the main game (which is to say, much better than the equivalent controls on other platforms).

I noticed this as well -- take away the twitch/headshot aspect of FPS and suddenly the console isn't a hindrance. I love the people who quote Quake 3 on the dreamcast, a game that's based entirely on twitch deathmatch.

Oh yeah, those pesky patches fixing bugs in gameplay and adding new content. Please, play through HL2 RTM and then play the current Steam version; your heart will leap for joy every time you see the updater pop up. Also read the changelogs for Counter-Strike and TF2. If you're playing the orange box version of TF2 I laugh in your general direction, because there have been dozens of critical bugs fixed and the gameplay has been tweaked to actual playability since the beta/release. Do pyros still do 2 damage

Actually, there have been updates to console versions. They don't need to update the DVD, they just put the patch on the hard drive. When the game starts up, it sees the patch on the hard drive and it applies it then or it simply uses the patch data instead of the DVD data. It's not a new concept. It was done on the Xbox.

I'm at the point where, if a game is released on both a pc and a console I own, I'll probably opt for the console version. I might go pc if there is a significant modding component to the game, or if the interface really demands mouse/keyboard input, but in general the whole experience of console gaming seems better than pc gaming.

I've stopped caring about cutting edge graphics, and decided that having to install games is stupid; pc games are far buggier; and I like the living room+tv combo better than

Can't speak for OP, but... I don't like FPS games that much, at least not enough for them to be enough to ditch the console. Some people like other game types. Also, I'm one of the types of people who isn't big on multiplayer -- generally, I only play a multiplayer game if someone else asks. Not saying it isn't fun, it's just not for me.

This isn't to say I don't enjoy FPSs -- I've been playing them since Wolfenstein 3D (on the PC; please God save me from t

This is exactly the same kind of crap that all the programmers, software engineers, and IT guys I know bitch about all the time. Their bosses want something sooner than it was promised, so they use weasel-like techniques to get a promise of the end result that much sooner. "Ok, you can't finish until February. Can I have a functional prototype in late December?"... Well.. NO! They're just going to take the "prototype" and sell it like the actual release, and everybody knows it.

Same deal with a demo. The review sites are going to review it like it's the final product even though it's not done. A demo before christmas for a game that doesn't come out until next year isn't going to increase holiday sales. What's the point of the demo other than to distract the developers from producing the actual final product for a while?

Honestly I don't blame these guys for not releasing a demo of an incomplete product. I wouldn't either.

Sony is a content provider - movies, music, games - in addition to TVs and electronics.

And since the Wii is not using an HDTV display, it's not like they couldn't just realize the market for a game that plays on both the PS3 (with premium content) and on the Wii (lower res) would have greater sales, and still shut out MSFT's xBox360...

Sometimes you have to wake up and smell the failure of the console wars, and realize yo

Oh please. Sony unveiled this game for the first time ever about nine months ago. Who is honestly going to give Sony shit over taking more than nine months to get to a publicly available demo of what looks to be one of the best done games on consoles in the last five years?

Props to Sony for giving the game time to be done right instead of looking at their hardware numbers and demanding a half-asses solution immediately.

I don't fault them for taking their time to finish the game. I fault them for announcing it WAY before it was ready. I realize that they are feeling the pressure and needed to drum up some hype, but hype gets old real fast. There's a good reason why they start showing movie trailers a 2-4 weeks before the movie debuts.